Dried foods, other than dried fruits, are now on the market. Milk, vegetables, and meats are often dried. It has been the theory in the past that this deprived the foods of nothing but their water. This is now fully proved to be not so. Barnes and Hume have shown that milk dried by the ordinary processes loses about two-fifths of its antiscorbutic efficacy. Hess and Unger state that the most actively antiscorbutic vegetables lose their efficacy when dried. An outbreak of Scurvy in the Rummelsburg orphanage, a few years ago, was attributed by Mueller and Erich to the use of pasteurized milk and dried vegetables. These vegetables had been bleached before drying and this made them all the worse, for in the bleaching they had forfeited their excess of bases. Heating at a comparatively low temperature, 30 to 40 degrees centigrade, is more injurious to vitamin C, than boiling for an hour.

The drying of cabbage, carrots and dandelion greatly impairs their antiscorbutic qualities. The C quality of cabbage is wholly destroyed at 110 degrees centigrade. Dried potatoes are also deficient in C. Dried cabbage, when stored for two to three weeks, has its vitamin C reduced by about nine-tenth. Three months storage completely destroys its antiscorbutic qualities.

The outbreak of scurvy in the Bulgarian Army during the Balkan war a few years ago, developed in spite of (perhaps, as Berg insists, because of) the fact that dried vegetables were supplied as prophylactics.

Sulphured fruits are unfit for use. They are saturated with the poisonous sulphurous acid used in bleaching them. Sundried and dehydrated fruits are preferable and I am suspicious of the dehydrated articles.

Stefanson's experiences in the Arctic emphasizes the need for fresh foods and confirm the results of many experiments which show that preserved, heated and desiccated foods lose much of their value. The value of fresh, raw fruits and vegetables and the inadequacy of denatured, processed, refined, cooked, canned, dried, desiccated, preserved and embalmed foods, as revealed by experience and experiment, will remain unshaken.

Cooking, bleaching, canning, preserving and drying (with the possible exception of sun-drying) of fruits, vegetables, grains, milk, meat and other food stuffs, are all denaturing processes and have much the same results as the milling of wheat or the polishing of rice. "Since prolonged heat is in any case injurious," says. Berg, "it is obvious that the drying of nutrients at a raised temperature must be extremely disadvantageous."